Inside the old gym on Newman Road on the outskirts of Sheffield, where boxers
of the pedigree of Prince Naseem Hamed, Herol Graham and Johnny Nelson all
learnt their trade, a 33-year-old veteran is at work. Moving up and down a
set of parallel lines about 1m apart and 10m in length in the centre of the
floor, gliding inside and outside the lines while he throws short punches in
quick combinations, Junior Witter demonstrates almost balletic poise.
Effortlessly, too, he conveys anonymity.
If an interloper were to walk towards the more striking sight of eight
fighters at the far end of the gym all in the ring at once, sparring in
pairs and performing back-flips and forward tumbles on instruction from
their trainer, Brendan Ingle, it would be understandable. Witter would
acknowledge it himself. The World Boxing Council (WBC) light-welterweight
title holder has struggled to command attention throughout his career, and
no one outside of the cognoscenti was interested in the name or in an
impressive body of work built around 36 wins, two draws and only one defeat.
“Wrong time, wrong place,” Witter reflects with a gentle shrug, uncertain as
to whether his luck will ever change.
His fate could be transformed in an instant, of course, if Ricky Hatton were
to submit, finally, to a long-overdue showdown in a sport resurgent at least
partly because quality, competitive matches are being made again in the wake
of years of phoney wars. Hatton-Witter is as spiteful a rivalry as that of
Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn, who drew 42,000 people to their Old Traf-ford
rematch 14 years ago when 18m viewers tuned in to watch it on Saturday night
prime time TV. The Hitman from Manchester is estimated to have earned
between £15m and £20m for his failed effort to unseat pound-for-pound king
Floyd Mayweather earlier this month in Las Vegas and, inevitably, Witter is
frustrated over Hatton’s apparent reluctance to engage.
“Hatton has avoided fighting me for years and he’s still avoiding me,” Witter
insists. “I look on it and think that life’s not fair and that’s just it.
I’ve got a saying I use when a couple of my friends ask me how I’m doing.
‘I’m still black,’ I tell them. I could say, ‘I’m still Irish or I’m still
Pakistani.’ Anyone who has been persecuted over the years for reasons that
are unjust, that’s how I feel sometimes. But that’s life. Life’s not fair
and people aren’t fair. Things go wrong and you don’t get what you deserve
all the time. So you make the best of what you’ve got. I’ve got my health,
I’ve got good friends around me, a good team behind me, a good woman. My
life is truly fruitful. Do I think I could beat Ricky Hatton? Of course I
do. I have no doubt at all and he knows it, too.
“Technically, he’s limited. He has a big heart, he’s fit when he steps in the
ring and he’s driven. He’s also good at what he does, pressuring opponents
and wearing them down. But that wasn’t enough to beat Mayweather and it
wouldn’t be enough against me. Ricky was lucky because he came around at the
right time, straight after Naz whose personality and arrogance people had
grown to hate. Hatton was white, from Manchester, loved his football, drank
too much and was a typical lad. His style was basic and easy to understand.
Frank Warren [who promoted Hatton until their split following Hatton’s world
title victory over Australian legend Kostya Tszyu] built him up brilliantly
and people tuned in because he’s not an unlikeable guy. Every so often a
fight between us would get close but then it would just go away again. If a
fight was too dangerous for Ricky it didn’t happen, so every time I was in
the way I got moved out of his path. Hatton hates me and he can’t stand the
fact that I’ll beat him, if we ever get it on in the ring. That’s why he and
his handlers have never allowed the fight to take place.”
Aesthetic concerns have played their part, too. While it is true that Witter
is coming off the most impressive win of his career, a dominating and
stunningly convincing performance against the American, Vivian Harris, whom
he knocked out in the seventh round on September 7, combining power and
authority with the elusiveness that is his forte, he has not always been
pleasing on the eye. When he challenged another American, Zab Judah, for the
International Boxing Federation (IBF) light-welterweight title in June 2000
he was vilified for his tactics. “If I knew this was a track meet, I would
have brought my track shoes,” Judah sneered, even though Witter had taken
the fight on just nine days’ notice. In September 2006 he made his second
attempt to win an alphabet world title and prevailed on points over DeMarcus
Corley from the United States but his performance was once again criticised.
“One of its abiding images will be the occasion in the seventh round when
both boxers stood statue-still for so long that ringsiders must have been
tempted to paint them silver and cart them off to join the buskers in Covent
Garden,” wrote Hugh McIlvanney.
Nobody would deny that Witter’s power, hand speed and all-round acumen are
formidable. But the business of boxing will always demand more. When Ray
Hatton, who manages his son’s career, acknowledged recently that he could
“see a Junior Witter fight [happening] at some stage, but not right now”,
Hatton’s lawyer, Gareth Williams, forcefully explained the camp’s reasoning.
“Ricky feels Junior has been trying to piggy-back on his success and he
resents the thought of giving Witter his biggest pay-day,” Williams
revealed. “Ricky took thousands of fans to see him fight in Las Vegas while
Junior Witter had his last fight in front of two men and a dog in a phone
box in Doncaster. They’re not in the same league.”
The sport’s most authoritative independent voice, The Ring magazine, begs to
differ. Despite his defeat by Mayweather, Hatton is still The Ring’s
light-welterweight champion and Witter is rated No 1 among the ranks of
contenders. But Hatton’s is the voice that matters most. “Frank Warren built
me up and he didn’t build up Junior,” the 29-year-old said earlier this
year. “I was fighting Freddie Pendleton and Vince Phillips and Junior was
still fighting six-rounders. Witter has won the British title, the European
title, the Commonwealth title, the WBC title and, ultimately he’s had a
great career. But I’ve enjoyed seeing him squirm, fighting nobodies and
getting no money. The only way he’s going to make considerable money is by
fighting me.”
Their cold war dates back to October 2000 when Witter gate-crashed a live TV
interview after Hatton’s British title-winning effort over Jon Thaxton, then
one of Witter’s stablemates. “He probably regrets it to this day,” Hatton
maintains. But the Bradford boxer insists he was trying to hype up a
potential money-spinner.
For years Witter had struggled to make any impact in boxing. As an amateur, he
won more than 100 bouts but he did not turn pro until he was 22. At
technical college he qualified in computer service engineering and secured a
job with Jennings Computers in his hometown. “I was building, servicing and
carrying out repairs on computers and printers,” he explains. He was also
working as a barman at the Britannia Social Club in Bradford and, as his
career in computers lapsed, he took a job packing greetings cards and then
another packaging fruit and veg at a Morrisons warehouse. He was working the
6am to 2pm shift at Morrisons when he first began to make the journey from
Bradford to Ingle’s gym in Sheffield having decided to box professionally.
“I always remember one particular teacher at school saying to me, ‘You better
be good at boxing because you’re going to do nothing else in your life’. I
just said right back, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be brilliant’, because I believed
in myself and I carry that belief with me to this day,” he says. “When I
first turned pro the travelling from Bradford to Sheffield and driving back
home from the gym was too much. A couple of times I fell asleep at the
wheel, so I went to Brendan’s son, John, and said I’d have to get a house
here. I was living up the road from here in a three-bedroom house John
rented out to me and some other boxers. A guy called Jimmy Phelan used to do
the cooking and I sorted out the bills, made sure everything was paid. It
was ideal for me because I was close to the gym and could come here to work
every day. I’ve always put the hours in and that comes from my mum and dad,
who had things tough and had to work hard to make ends meet.
“Six years ago I boxed on my 27th birthday at York Hall, Bethnal Green. I
remember getting up and opening my birthday card from my girlfriend and
that’s as near as I got to really celebrating. I said to myself that after
the fight I’d go out and celebrate in great style, go to a club, listen to
some R&B music and relax. Well, I stopped my opponent, David Kirk, in
the second round, got changed, went out to the minibus, which was also
carrying some family and friends, and by the time we got back to Bradford it
was 4am, so I went to bed. These are some of the sacrifices you make in
order to be able to achieve.”
Occasionally, the vexing reality of being trapped on the margins has caused
Witter to question his professional future. “Those thoughts have
occasionally run through my head,” he admits. “But there was nothing else I
could go and do and boxing has always made me happy, even in the worst of
times.” Now that the best of times may still be ahead, he is not about to
alter this view. “If the fight with Hatton happens, great. If it doesn’t, it
will be because he’s scared to fight me and that’s the truth of why it
hasn’t happened all these years,” Witter says. “It’s a natural, just like
Eubank and Benn. Imagine if one of them had said, ‘Nah, I don’t want to
fight you’. Ricky seems to get away with it even though we could fill a
football ground. I want to make decent money and move on. I could fight the
IBF champion Paulie Malignaggi, but me and Hatton is the fight people want.”
